by Mark Budz
“I’ll talk to you later,” Alphonse says.
“I miss you,” she says. “Take care.”
But he’s gone, dropped offline, and she finds her hand pressed to her chest, curled fingers hunting for the lost cross.
17
IN MEDIA REZ
You don’t look well.” The structural engineer glides half a meter to one side of him, as effortless as a largemouth bass in a quiet pool of water.
Rexx waves a hand. He’s breathing heavily, as much from the tourniquet-tight biosuit as exertion. Smart fabric typically autosized by computing the total surface area of skin to be covered. But with so many loose folds and wrinkles to factor into the equation, the suit has apparently miscalculated. The bubble helmet is fishbowl tight and his head pounds. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Soon as I get to a lab.”
“I hope so,” Hjert says. “The last thing I need right now is more deadweight. Here”—she hands him a mesh utility belt with a high-intensity work light and a half dozen CO2 cartridges—“you’ll need this.”
“You always this hospitable?” He has to unfurl the belt to its full length to buckle it around his waist.
“No. You caught me on one of my good days.”
“I guess I ought to count my blessings.”
“If I were you, I’d wait until they hatched.”
Wheezing, he struggles to keep up with her as they navigate the magtube that leads from the docking tower to the main cliffside facade of the arcology. In the absence of magnetic flux lines he has to guide himself using the joint rings and sections of curved aluminum grating.
“Where we headed?” he says.
“Ground zero.”
“The esplanade?” That was where Liam Vitt and the others died.
Hjert shakes her head. “That was a secondary failure. The primary failure occurred in the main power plant. You want samples, you’ll find plenty to choose from there. Hell—you might even become one. Save yourself the trouble of going back for seconds.”
With a quick finger tap he switches com channels and onlines his IA. “I’d like to look at a schematic of the colony.”
“Elevation or plan?” Claire’s voice crackles, prickly with static.
“Both.”
“I’ll squirt you . . . file . . . then streaming.”
“Why all the noise?”
“. . . count . . . interference. Security filter . . . you.”
A pair of datawindows appears on the inside of his eyescreens, one etched in blue lines, the other in red. His location is marked by a green blip. The power plant, located deep inside the asteroid, gathers energy from a variety of sources: solar, acoustic, piezoelectric, thermal. Even the network of lightdomes throughout the arcology route a part of the scant radiation they collect to the core plant for storage and redistribution. According to the schematics, access to the power plant is through a single vertical shaft, located directly below the main dome.
Rexx notes that the biolabs are a couple of levels up from the power facility, located in a sector that’s labeled Research. He switches from Claire to Hjert. “Anything else you can tell me about the system failures?”
“Whatever’s causing them spends a lot of time datamining stuff in the mediasphere. Or has, in the past.”
“You’re talkin’ about the images we’re seein’ on the newstreams from Earth.”
“Right. It’s like an ad virus has gotten out of control and is randomly spreading tattunes and old graffitics. Except that it’s not confined to people. The entire ecotecture is susceptible. And the tattunes don’t go away after a few hours. They stick around and evolve.”
“Evolve?”
“You know. Change, grow . . . deform.”
“How do you know the problem is spreading randomly?”
“Because we can’t model it.” Her voice becomes suddenly tinny. “The behavior is random, chaotic.”
They enter one of the eight barrel-vault esplanades cantilevered out from the cliff face. The view of the canyon through the colonnade’s sheet-diamond windows is spectacular. A panorama of X-ray– and gamma-ray–illuminated rock and ice. Framed in white marble, each window is thirty meters wide by fifty meters high. Rexx glances up at the long, semicircular vault, where dead withered vines dangle from the carbyne structure like ripped-out electrical wires. The light-gathering lenses are shriveled and cataract-blind, clouded with ice. Curled bananopy leaves float in the vacuum, frozen and brittle, no longer attached to their anchor roots. A hoar of blackened, desiccated lichen clings to the capitals of the Corinthian columns, encrusts the florid Art Nouveau mural done in multicolored tile.
On the cliff side of the esplanade, built into rock as smooth and reflective as polished glass, the dim privacy screens, balconies, and patios of multilevel apartments. Bare trellis awnings and railings, devoid of vegetation, glint in the gray half-dark. Ditto the elevated veranda at the far end, where the palapas that cover the park’s seats and tables are little more than stick-ribbed umbrellas.
Not far from the veranda, next to a planter box littered with the stubs of burned-out circuitrees, a foam patch scabs the barrel vault.
Rexx points. “That where the accident happened?”
Hjert nods. “They were connecting the trees to the local electrical grid when the plant went down. There was a power surge.”
A body appears in the daguerreotype shadows. Eyes wink and a grin flashes.
The skin on the nape of Rexx’s neck crawls. He pushes off from the catwalk they’re following, launching himself toward the hole and the retreating figure.
Hjert kicks after him. “Are you crazy? You rip open your suit on one of those broken joists and you’re history.”
Splintered sections of frame poke from around the edges of the patch like punji sticks, waiting to impale him. He reaches out. But there’s nothing to grab on to, no way to slow down or change direction.
Ten meters away, and the dagger-sharp tip of a broken, shattered joist gleams in faint starlight.
“Shit.” Sweat greases his neck, lubricates his armpits.
Five meters. The joist isn’t just going to nick him, it’s going to skewer him like a stuck, squealing pig.
Three meters. Rexx yanks his knees to his stomach, tucks his hands in to protect his chest, and somersaults forward, headfirst into the oversize nail.
Something grabs him by his left ankle, clamps down hard, and twists. He rotates sideways, arms windmilling, eyes clenched. . . .
And slams into the barrel vault. The impact shoves the air from his lungs and he deflates, going limp. He can’t move, can’t breathe. His mouth and eyes bulge open. All he can see are his own features reflected in the curve of his bubble helmet.
The pressure around his ankle eases. A moment later, Hjert appears in front of him. “You okay?”
Rexx works his mouth. His tongue flails.
She curses under her breath, flexes her gloved hands at him. “You’re a fool, you know that? I don’t know what you were thinking. What you expected to find.”
His lungs unlock. He sucks in air. Tears ooze from the corners of his eyes and hang in front of his reflection.
“You keep this shit up, and you’re gonna get us killed.”
“I thought I saw something.” He looks around, his gaze following an erratic orbit, searching for the figure.
“Like what, pray tell?”
“I don’t know. Someone. A body. Maybe one of the workers who died and was never recovered.”
Her pupils flare and her eyes widen, the whites gibbous. “They’re gone. Trust me. There’s no one here but us.”
His gaze settles on a mangled section of framework, where a joist split near the end has spread apart. Seen from below, they could look like arms.
“Let’s go.” Hjert turns. “And no more side trips.”
Rexx glances at the stick figure as he drifts past it. It was nothing, he tells himself. An optical illusion.
A breezeway at the end of the barrel vault
connects the esplanade to a central elevatorlike tower that joins the cliff-face sections of the arcology to one another and to the interior space. They descend into the fissure, drawn down the vertical shaft by a few tenuous micro-g’s. Shriveled palm fronds and freeze-dried schools of scuttleaves drift in hapless clumps. Their passing leaves no wake, provokes no hint of awakening.
At the bottom of the tube, a fifty-by-fifty-meter-square tunnel bores into the heart of the asteroid. The sides function as floors, walls, or ceilings, depending on one’s orientation. This is the colony’s commercial district, rife with cafés, shops, restaurants, and kiosks that are set up to sell everything from arts, crafts, and clothing to fast food. The chrome-and-glass storefronts are unfinished, vacant except for the pus-yellow spores that have overrun this sector of the ecotecture.
“They’ve spread,” Hjert notes.
Rexx slows to a stop near an aggregate of spores. “How fast?” He withdraws a biopsy needle from the kangaroo pocket clipped to the front of his biosuit.
Hjert eyes the needle and hangs back, staying well out of his way. “Yesterday there were maybe half what you see now.”
Rexx moves his face to within a couple of centimeters of one sporoid, which is vaguely human shaped. Oblong, swollen, with stubby arms, legs, and head, but split down the middle.
Bread of the dead.
He shakes his head—the place has got him spooked—raises the needle, and then pauses. Cranes his head sideways.
Viewed from the side, the bottom of the sporoid is shaped like a chin. There’s even a hint of a jawline. But what really grabs his attention is the horizontal slit, which looks for all the world like a parted mouth, with vestigial lips upturned in a cryptic smile. Curved and shadowed at the corners.
“What the hell?” he mutters. He straightens, thinking that will cure the trick of light from his helmet. But the lips refuse to go away. He glances around at the other sporoids. Hundreds of little chubby bodies, all smiling at him with familiar lips . . .
“It’s a pan de los muertos figure,” his mother said, avoiding the word “doll” so he wouldn’t associate it with the rest of her collection. “I bought it for your birthday.”
He would be seven in two days. “Where did you get it?” The doll looked cheap—Third World.
“Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s to celebrate All Souls’ Day.”
Rexx took the doll. It was soft, cloth sewn together by hand and stuffed with some sort of sponge. “It’s fat like me,” he said.
“It’s not fat. It just has a big soul. Like you, its soul is too big for its body and has to get out. . . .”
“What did you find?” Hjert says, edging closer.
Rexx shakes his head. “Nothing.” He biopsies the doughy figure—jabs it right in one bloated side, then backs away quickly. The smile follows him. Mysterious and secretive, Cheshire in its persistence. His skin crawls, as if he’s just swallowed the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila.
From the business zone they enter the city center, watched over by a lightdome as big as any found in a Gothic cathedral. It stares down at the administrative and civic hub, bloodshot and rheumy, unblinking.
Government offices and spaces for other professional businesses line the outside circumference in four levels. It reminds Rexx of the Colosseum in Rome, tiered and imposing. Access tubes to each level—arranged like spokes in a wheel—radiate from a central shaft riddled with little perforations of different shapes and sizes, squares, circles, and triangles, through which he can see traffic-flow dividers, biolum panels, and trellises decorated with rattan-textured lichen and sound-absorbent moss.
“Analysis?” Rexx asks Claire. The IA should have gotten the datasquirt from the syringe by now. Instead of a geneprint and chemical composition, he streams static hiss. “Are you able to access your IA?” he asks Hjert.
“Yes. But it’s platformed locally. If you try to connect to an outside datastream, you could have a problem. Kerusa’s installed firewalls to limit our communications and every time they increase security our bandwidth shrinks.”
They hurry on. Hjert guides him into the central magtube, through one of twelve hardseal hatches, arranged in a circle, that accesses the industrial netherworld of the colony. As they approach the power plant the magtube narrows in stages, successive cylinders within cylinders. The light from the biolum panels dims to a sickly green the color of pond scum or aquarium algae. Which tells Rexx that the sanitation systems are down. As a kid he flushed enough fungus-fuzzed guppies to know a polluted closed-system environment when he sees one.
“Here we are,” Hjert says, ushering him into a huge cube of a room. “Let’s make it quick.”
The dandelionlike power plant sits in the middle of a circular colonnade of fluted support columns. Almost thirty meters in diameter, the plant is wired to the arcology by a placenta of thick insulated wires that root it to the floor.
Around the plant the columns and walls are covered with a rash of images. Every square centimeter is covered in visual bricolage. The collage seethes, primordial, with media snippets. Product logos, pictures of film and video stars, as well as other cultural icons, the glyphs layered like gang tags. No way to distinguish where one graffitic ends and the next begins. A Japanese wood print leaps out of the fray, blue water behind a white-flowering tree. A beret-shadowed face. Lines of Sanskrit or another ancient text scrolling across the still life of a clown. A packet of Camel nicaffeine derms. Macabro, the Silver Skeleton VRcade hero, rendered in pen and ink. A smiling yellow circle with two black dots for eyes.
Ad infinitum. He could stare, entranced, for hours.
“What’re you waiting for?” Hjert says. She looks around, nervous.
Her impatience goads him. He pushes off toward one of the fouled biolum panels. The scum on this one is darker than the others, nearly black. As he gets closer he can see the faint outline of an image. A shroud-of-Turin imprint, the features blurred, not yet fully formed.
He turns to Hjert. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
She squints. “I don’t see anything.”
“It looks like a face.”
“Whose?”
“I’m not sure.” Rexx biopsies the black velvet image, and then moves on to a group of snifflowers. Gengineered to collect and analyze air samples, the petuniaesque blossoms exude a sticky goo. Normally the petals are open, eager to gather any stray particles. But the blooms are crimped, pursed, as if blowing . . . well, a kiss.
“They look like lips,” Rexx said.
Hjert puckers her mouth. “Maybe.”
There’s no maybe about it. The glossy red pucker is familiar. Rexx has seen it before. Where? He can’t quite put a finger on it, can’t quite get the memory to congeal.
Something from the past. His childhood. One of those early imprinted archetypes that last a lifetime. A nearby tapestree branch has a ginseng-shaped growth. Legs, hips, and a wasp-narrow waist topped by what appear to be emergent breasts.
Rexx’s hand trembles, a dry rain-starved quaver. He clamps his jaw hard against a deeper convulsion, sinuous and muscular, that coils around his bowels.
Withdrawal. What his old man called the DTs, coming down from one of his binges.
“You got any results yet?” Hjert asks.
He biopsies the ginseng-shaped growth. “No. My IA’s still out to lunch. I need to get to a lab. I might need to borrow your IA, too, if mine doesn’t come back online. It’ll only be for a few hours.”
“No problem. A few hours is all you got anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re establishing a quarantine zone for us on the station. We’ve been ordered to evacuate.”
“When?”
“Soon as the QZ’s ready. The ops managers are guesstimating four hours. That’s if everything goes well.”
Which means that he has at least six hours. More, if he’s one of the last citizens out of Dodge.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s get out of her
e, see what we got.”
“About time.”
As they head up the access tube, Rexx has the feeling they’re being followed . . . or watched. He cuts a quick gotcha glance over his shoulder.
Nothing.
Still, he can’t shake the feeling that something is slowly taking shape. Something that’s not quite ready to reveal itself.
18
LABOR RELATIONS
Oye, compadre,” the vat worker next to him says with a knowing wink. “You look a little tired this morning.”
L. Mariachi glances at the worker. The chavo is pudgy, in his late twenties or early thirties, clean-shaven, with a conservative haircut, neatly trimmed mustache, and ascetic octagon-shaped eyescreens that scream intelligentsia. An academic down on his luck or researching his thesis firsthand.
“A viente!” L. Mariachi rasps, the retort weary but good-natured. Same to you.
He still hasn’t fully recovered from the healing ceremony. His left hand throbs. So does his head, which feels as light and fragile as an eggshell. But the pherions the patrón is pumping into the vat have got all the vat workers feeling good despite the night of rampant parties and the inevitable hangovers. For the most part, the braceros are happy, upbeat, diligently working through their fatigue in a spirit of friendly cooperation and conscientious resolve.
His pall of fatigue is slower to lift—not quite as easy to shrug off as it has been in the past. He’s weighted down with pain, and a shroud of uncertainty heavier than the vat waders he’s wearing. Heavy cellophane pantaloons that keep his legs dry and fairly cool, but have the coefficient of drag of an oil tanker. The overhead dome magnifies the sky, turns the knee-deep, gumbo-thick effluent that fills the vat into hot, steaming soup. Sour with nutrients, it makes his eyes water and the inside of his nose burn. A few days of this, and his lungs will be scraped raw.
